Busy Bees, Plural: Academic Comparison is Never Helpful
Truman State University is known as an academically rigorous school. Money Magazine went so far as to nickname it the “Harvard of the Midwest.” According to the University website, there are over 250 different student organizations and around 20 percent of all Truman students are actively involved in Fraternity and Sorority Life. To put it simply, Truman students are busy.
Truman may be an elevated challenge, but college itself presents quite the feat as students are managing courses alongside working and potentially tackling the experience of living on their own for the first time. People comparing their workloads and trying to “one-up” each other in terms of who has it worse, pertaining to busyness, is my biggest pet peeve — it’s disrespectful.
Self-concept influences how one interacts with everyday scenarios, and often it can be broken down into various categories. Academic self-concepts are formed by contrasting one’s own achievements with others in their vicinity. An article published in the National Library of Medicine discusses the way social comparison affects academic self-concepts by diving deep into the results from a longitudinal social network analysis. They found that constant academic competition and comparison are immensely unhealthy for overall relationship growth as well as individual identity.
The battle of the busiest — BOTB, as I’ve named this phenomenon — is not only irritating, but has significant psychological effects on mental well-being and one’s overall ability to perform. When one’s self-perception–or understanding of identity–does not fulfill what one had aspired for, it can lead to a lower academic confidence. In order to truly compare yourself to another academically, one needs to be aware of how their target performs. These comparisons primarily show up in BOTB when individuals inquire about another’s workload to gauge where they can place themselves on the workload competition. This idea of academic self-concept being affected by comparison is never beneficial because everyone has different experiences and can handle different things.
Senior communication major Erin Donegan believes that there should be more recognition in regards to what others are going through — empathy breeds community. Donegan’s own experiences support the understanding that comparison regarding academics and work ethic is never helpful. As a communication major living with other University students of various degrees, Donegan relates how commenting on being extremely busy ignores what other people are accomplishing. Any major should preserve the freedom to feel overwhelmed and complain about their work because one person’s “Easy A” could be another person’s worst nightmare.
The cliche: everyone is going through different experiences and you never know what could be going on behind the scenes in another person’s life. Trying to outwin the “who stayed up later” contest doesn’t improve mental well-being, in fact, it only takes away more time that one should be spending actually sleeping if their claims are true.
